


Grounding

by SonglordsBug



Series: Darcy Stark [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Darcy Lewis is Not Tony Stark's Daughter, Darcy Lewis is Phil Coulson's sister, Darcy Lewis is Tony Stark's Sister, Gen, Headcanon, coping mechanisms for very active brains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-15 03:43:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16925823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SonglordsBug/pseuds/SonglordsBug
Summary: Stark brains go too fast sometimes. Each of the Stark children have different coping mechanisms.





	Grounding

All three Stark children sometimes get stuck in their own heads. Their minds run so quickly that they get caught in loops and can have difficulty focusing and dealing with the world. They all have different coping mechanisms.

Tony’s first choice is music. The reason he plays his music so loud is that the heavy thud of the base grounds him. It’s just a bonus that it annoys most other people and keeps them out of his lab.

His second choice is to physically fiddle around with a wrench or two. There are several reasons he has so many cars and the main one is that if he can’t get his mind to settle he can always open one up and start doing some maintenance or improving. Nowadays, he also has the suits to fiddle with. His need to always tinker with things is one of the reasons his family calls him Tinker.

Phil’s first choice is physical. When he can’t get his mind to settle and focus on his current activity he heads to the gym to run or swim or hit a punching bag. His need for physical activity is part of what lead him to the army, that and following his mother’s footsteps.

When getting physical isn’t an option, he finds complicated but boring tasks help. Fortunately these days there’s always Shield paperwork to take care of.

Darcy’s main grounding tools are numbers. While Tony is the builder and Phil can manage people and paperwork, Darcy is even better at math than either of them. When she needs to calm down she’ll start reciting binary to herself. Her brothers figured out that that helped her before she did and at this point whenever one of them is upset and another is around, they’ll just start counting in binary to each other.

Darcy’s first language is English, but since her brothers were also working on a potential AI, she started speaking in binary at a very young age. In fact, Jarvis’ code is actually based on a code she started speaking (and her brothers had to figure out quickly to keep up) when she was about four. At this point the three of them have several numerical codes that they can communicate in that no one else has yet been able to understand.


End file.
